Advice for Democrats from an unlikely place

In case you’re ever in doubt as to how much more extreme, fevered and just plain nuts the American political discourse is than our own (Flaherty versus McGuinty notwithstanding), I offer the following: This past Monday, a certain John Yoo wrote an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal, complaining about the democratic party’s undemocratic practice of appointing superdelegates to their upcoming nominating convention:

“The Democrats have created an electoral system that echoes failed models from the American past, and threatens to sap the presidency of its independence and authority by turning it into the handmaiden of Congress instead of the choice of the American people.”

Fair enough. But consider the source: John Yoo is described at the end of the piece as “a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He was an official in the Justice Department from 2001–03.”

What The Wall Street Journal fails to mention is that this is the same John Yoo who, during his tenure at the DOJ, wrote memo after memo justifying the administration’s use of torture, and encouraging the so-called signing statements that have allowed George Bush to conduct the war on terror by fiat. Soliciting lessons on democracy from John Yoo is rather like soliciting lessons on the evils of torture from Torquemada (or George W. Bush).